everything under and not under the sun…i have an opinion about everything and express myself through poems,articles stories,in short writing or ranting about it;)

opinion piece

Note: This is a 2 year old post. Unfortunately, Agent Carter has since been cancelled. However, my appreciation of the character remains and thus, when I happened across this post, I knew I had to publish it. Enjoy!

It’s 2015 and women in all fields have come far. Most people are progressive enough to look beyond gender as a factor and we are, in many ways moving towards a gender neutral society where we avoid judging a person for being different.

Agent Carter is a 1946 based period television show. Things were rather different back then. Those were better times, simpler times. Well, if you were a white heterosexual male. Otherwise, well-

Ability be damned.

Peggy Carter is a soldier, war veteran and hero all in her own right. And yet after the war, she’s rather disillusioned with her life stateside. Inspite of being a full time agent of the Strategic Scientific Research(SSR) her workload pretty much only includes taking the lunch orders, bringing coffee, manning the phones or filing the paperwork at best. She’s treated as an assistant instead of an agent.

A lesser woman would’ve given up. Made her peace with her stock in life. But not Peggy Carter. No. She takes life by the horns and deals with chauvinist colleagues and villains with equal wit, charm and badassery (that’s the scientific word for awesomesauceness)

It’s women like her who’ve made life easier for us in the present. She fights for respect and equality in an unfair world where her ability or skills aren’t what people see when they look at her.

She isn’t afraid to fight for what she thinks is right and is loyal to her friends and empathetic towards everyone, including her detractors.

Isn’t that the very definition of a hero?

Someone who can look beyond personal grudges and see and nurture the good in everyone.

Someone who upholds justice and peace, no matter the personal cost.

Peggy Carter is a woman who knows loss and pain all too well.

And yet, she hasn’t lost hope. She gets up in the morning hoping to make the world a better place, even if the world refuses to change.

She doesn’t do it for the glory, the money, the fancy ass costumes or the awe. She knows her value and doesn’t need people to sing songs or write of her exploits, she does it to know that she did good today. That she made herself proud.

But that isn’t the only thing that makes our girl a hero.

The thing that really made this character a hero in my eyes is that she isn’t infallible.

She stumbles, makes mistakes and sometimes she even forgets her value, who she is and what she is capable of.

We don’t just see the perfect hero, fighting the bad guys and saving the day…

We see the woman underneath, who just wants to be treated as a peer by her colleagues, who wants to grieve her lover’s death without having to seem strong, who sometimes forgets her value. We see the woman who cares deeply and genuinely about everything.

Peggy is more than a mask.

She is human.

And for me, that makes her one of the greatest heroes. She’s focused, driven, immaculate, badass but at the same time she’s kind, and immensely protective of those she calls her own and she makes mistakes.

She isn’t invincible. She doesn’t have super-anything.

But that doesn’t stop her from being a hero.

She rises to every occasion and I’m glad that ABC has renewed ‘Agent Carter’ because Peggy deserves it.

She makes me proud to be a woman and I’m so glad she was brought to life on our screens.

P.S. I’m pretty sure articles don’t actually have P.S.’s but this is important. I love the character but I think Hayley Atwell deserves a special shoutout. She has taken this one-off side role and turned into something amazing along with the entire Agent Carter crew. Kudos.

​People in this country do not seem to understand cause and effect. Every action you take or words you speak have an effect, a response. They expect that they will spout their opinions, make statements that have enormous implications and will suffer no backlash. This isn’t about religion, politics or economics. No. This is about cause and effect. The most popular of Newton’s laws. ‘Every action will have an equal and opposite reaction’ Remember this law. Tattoo it on your forehead. Understand that everytime you say or do something there will be consequences, regardless of your intentions. That is why ‘think before you speak/act’ is imbibed in us from a young age. This responsibility increases a hundred fold when you have some pull in society. This pull may be in the form of money, power or fame. India is not insulated from the world. When you say things like this country is inhabitable, violent and intolerant, the world watches. The world judges. They do not, and will not know the ground reality, but will come to the conclusion that somehow in the short term of this new regime, India has let go of 1000’s of years of unity. Forget the world stage. In India itself, these irresponsible statements have manufactured a sense of disharmony and fear. So yes, if India has had enough, if India wants to show its displeasure via peaceful protest and rant like tweets and facebook posts, it isn’t intolerance. It is a response. It is cause and effect. Jai Hind.

(*Written during the manufactured intolerance debate in India, after Aamir Khan’s offense statements about India and the subsequent boycott of Snapdeal and the products he endorsed at the time.)